


lotus flowers live forever

by StorytellerSecrets



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Amnesiac Mollymauk Tealeaf, Flashbacks, Gen, Male Pronouns for Mollymauk Tealeaf, Mollymauk Lives Fest, Mollymauk Tealeaf Lives, POV Mollymauk Tealeaf, Resurrection, Tieflings, idk how do i tag this?, no i don't know what i'm doing and no i'm not going to stop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-03
Updated: 2019-07-03
Packaged: 2020-06-03 14:29:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19465930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StorytellerSecrets/pseuds/StorytellerSecrets
Summary: He wakes up in a grave. That's how it starts.It's not going to be how it ends, even if he doesn't know why he's there.





	lotus flowers live forever

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know where this is going to go but it's going somewhere.

**_“Haashina, haashina, audutir melov.”_ **

He can’t see, can’t open his eyes at all, and his chest  _ hurts _ . He can’t hear, he can’t see, he can’t —

he can’t.

He can’t breathe.  He’s on the ground, hunched over and hacking up clumps of mold and congealed blood. He’s lying prone and waves of magic slam through him heart and then he’s braiding a stranger’s dark blue hair with a smile.

“ — y,” someone says a million miles away,“ — n respond  — this mess — ”

* * *

**_“Ellidottir, ellidottir, nekanku avittri.”_ **

There’s a blindfold covering his eyes and face and cotton in his mouth. There’s dirt in his ears and his eyes and it’s surrounding him like a blanket —l ike a  _ prison _ — and his shackles are made of roots.

He doesn’t know where he is or what he is or  _ who _ he is and all he knows is what he  _ doesn’t _ know.

He’s empty.

* * *

_ “ _ **_Avittri nekanku, nekanku,”_ **

he’s saying to a child covered in wrappings. He looms over her and he knows her, he  _ knows _ he does, but he can’t remember how and it’s like grasping at clouds.

“Not.” It’s one insignificant word, but they both grin, the girl with far more teeth than he.

* * *

**_“Audutir eschl—”_ **

“—iebe dich,” someone’s saying, pulling him close in a hold that screams of only safety and warmth. He hugs back, a little startled, but mostly warm.

“I don’t know what that means,” he starts to whisper, but is hushed by the meeting of lips on his. His eyelids flutter, and the memory fades.

* * *

He wakes up, and a sense of unbridled fear looms over him just as he had loomed over the green one with the yellow eyes.  _ Goblin _ , his brain tells him, and he decides to call her that. Goblin was very nice, if a little abrasive. Little and abrasive, actually. He still doesn’t know who she is or why he knows her face.

But time for that later.

When he awakens, when he truly and really rises from his slumber, it’s to the face of death. There’s a tarp draped over him, holding him in a tight embrace. It encircles him like he’s a swaddled child but it’s covering his face and he can’t  _ breathe _ and he’s going to die.

He thinks it would be really stupid for him to die in a grave. Because that’s what it is, a grave, he’d figured that out pretty early on in his panicking. He’s lost and alone and covered with dirt and rocks and roots and he doesn’t know how to escape his ramshackle prison of leaves and mud.

And he struggles and fights against the colorless tarp because it’s all he can do, but a horn catches on the fabric. He pulls but it hurts and he wants to stop but he can’t until he feels something that isn’t the tarp break at the seams.

Fortunately, it’s not his horns either. He doesn’t know what would happen if they broke. Doesn’t know if it would hurt and doesn’t want to find out. Instead, he hears the definite clatter and clink of jewelry as he checks for tears in the curved bone. He blinks, a little startled.

He hadn’t known he was wearing any.

To be fair, he hadn’t know a lot of things. He still  _ didn’t _ know a lot of things.

But he knew he had to get out. He knows.

He raises his head a little, determined. He isn’t staying here. He can’t.

First, he needs the tarp gone. He claws with his nails and, when that doesn’t work, with his teeth. It’s long and hard work, but eventually, the threads of the fabric tear and he takes in a breath of stale and dusty air.

Now he needs to get out. The earth is cold, tough, and solid. It’s clear he’s been here awhile. He doesn’t really want to think about what that means.  _ Can’t _ think about what it means, not truly, because his brain’s still muddled and drained and so achingly  _ empty _ .

Regardless, the soil is hard to maneuver. It’s gritty and falls in crumbling lumps as he scratches at it through the holes he made in the tarp. He digs for what feels like hours and he’s gotten nowhere, only a small pile of loam covering his already earth-covered legs.

He stops. It isn’t working. In trying to unearth himself from the ground, he’s successfully burying himself further.

He can’t stay. He can’t. If he stays the ground will open up and swallow him further, and he’ll never get to what’s above him.

Wait...what  _ is _ above him?

With all the time he’s spent searching for reprieve, he hasn’t spent a moment to consider what reaching the top would relieve him of. What if there is no top?

He’s panicking and he can’t breathe and the dirt around him is solid, like rock. He doesn’t know what rock is, but it must be like the soil. Hard, he thinks. It’s hard. He thrashes, his horns scrape harshly against the soil, small crumbles of dirt landing in his hair.

He pauses.

A curious moment passes, and then, he angles his head and pushes up. His horn breaks easily through the soil, jewelry catching some of the loam. A large cluster of dirt and rock falls to his legs. He curls the limbs closer, shoving the dirt where his legs once were.

He lowers his head and does it again.

It works. It’s slow and tedious work, but slowly—agonizingly slowly—the soil packs itself below and beside him and he gains ground. Ha, ground.

Shortly thereafter, as he moves further upwards, the hard ground turns soft and wet. He stops using his horns as a makeshift shovel and begins to remove the mud above him with his hands. It’s a cycle, quick and brutal and utterly desperate.

And then, long after he’s felt the fatigue settle deep in his bones, a stream of faint white shoots through. It lands on his hand, the light meeting with the wet mud sticking to his arm.

He’s done it. He pushes a hand up and meets open air and pulls himself through the remaining layer of mud. Water is falling from the blue above him, large droplets landing on the tarp still mostly encasing him. The heavy sound of water meeting earth fills his ears. And he stumbles, scrabbling atop the earth, mostly crawling and limping his way out of the tarp. His surroundings are near-invisible, his blurry eyes and the torrential rain muting the surroundings around him. He moves to stand and his knees give way, arms shooting out to catch his own fall.

He crawls away from the hole beside him, the need to get away from the thing that trapped him rising. He’s got to go, has to move away from whatever’s happening, has to do  _ something _ .

He has to leave. Now.

He moves, pitching himself over rocks and wet, slippery teardrops on the ground. Leaves, those are leaves. He knows that.

But  _ how _ does he know that? How does he-

it doesn’t matter. He needs to leave.

So he does.

**Author's Note:**

> comment on who you want to show up and maybe they will idk


End file.
